We’ve got a new release of Project MaiTai ready. Improvements in this release include:

• replaced proportional scrollbars and scrolling code with a brand new impl.
  should be much less buggy and a bit faster
• replaced the coffee cup icon in window frame on Windows with a proper
  MaiTai icon
• added right click popup menu to all blocks which lets you rename the block.
• position newly added blocks in the center of the current canvas viewport
  instead of at 0,0
• disable editors for input lines when they are connected to an output
• limit the size of the Stretch-And-Blur block to 600×400 to prevent
  accidental swap death

Oh yeah, and one more thing. If you are running Snow Leopard on a unibody Mac laptop with the large multitouch trackpad you can now use the MultiTouch block to get the X and Y of every finger you have on the trackpad (up to 10).

To test it out try opening this project in the new build of MaiTai, then move your fingers on the trackpad to see a particle effect for each one.

Particles from five fingertips

MaiTai can do multitouch thanks to this cool library by Wayne Keenan

Due to some wonkiness between Hudson and webstart I’ve moved the beta download link to here. This beta build will only be updated when we push a release. If you want the continuous build, which could break at any time, it’s still on hudson.

Project MaiTai

MaiTai lets you visually wire up blocks to create interactive graphics. Think of them almost as animated sculptures. There are blocks for nodes (shapes, images, colors), effects, simple logic, and inputs from the mouse, keyboard, webservices (Flickr & Twitter streams), and realtime sound spectrum from MP3s. Once you are happy with the results you can export it as a JavaFX WebStart app or a Quicktime movie suitable for uploading to video sharing websites.

To try it out go to ProjectMaiTai.org, and click on the download link in the right sidebar. Once the app starts you can try some examples from the ‘samples‘ button in the toolbar. Here’s a taste of what you can create with MaiTai.

MaiTai is fully open source (BSD), and built entirely in JavaFX. The current version uses JavaFX 1.2.1 on Java 6. This version is still very alpha, but you can already do some interesting things with it. Please join the roadmap mailing list to give feedback and suggest new features.